物理学史与哲学

When V. M. Slipher gave the 1933 George Darwin lecture to the Royal Astronomical Society, it was natural that he spoke on spectrographic studies of planets. Less than one-sixth of his published work deals with globular clusters and the…

Why do some discoveries, which appear in hindsight to be obviously major discoveries, have so little impact when they were made. These are discoveries that were ahead of their time, but for some reason the scientific community was not ready…

Vesto Melvin Slipher was the first astronomer to clearly define the factors that determine the "speed" of a nebular spectrograph. This brief historical summary recounts the way these ideas developed and how Slipher's early work on galaxy…

Edwin Hubble is famous for a number of discoveries that are well known to amateur and professional astronomers, students and the general public. The origins of these discoveries are examined and it is demonstrated that, in each case, a…

By 1917, V.M. Slipher had singlehandedly established a tendency for 'spiral nebulae' to be redshifted (21 out of 25 cases). From a modern perspective, it could seem surprising that the expansion of the universe was not announced at this…

A complete history of early atomic models would fill volumes, but a reasonably coherent tale of the path from mechanical atoms to the quantum can be told by focusing on the relevant work of three great contributors to atomic physics, in the…

It is known that Einstein's conceptual base for his theory of relativity was the philosophy formulated by Immanuel Kant. Things appear differently to observers in different frames. However, Kant's Ding-an-Sich leads to the existence of the…

The name "big bang" introduced by Fred Hoyle in 1949 is one of the most successful scientific neologisms ever. How did the name originate and how was it received by physicists and astronomers in the period leading up to the hot big bang…

In 1912, Otto Sackur and Hugo Tetrode independently put forward an equation for the absolute entropy of a monoatomic ideal gas and published it in "Annalen der Physik." The grand achievement in the derivation of this equation was the…

Constructor theory seeks to express all fundamental scientific theories in terms of a dichotomy between possible and impossible physical transformations - those that can be caused to happen and those that cannot. This is a departure from…

A century ago, "past" and "future", previously strictly apart, mixed up and merged. Temporal terminology improved. Today, not actualized quantum states, that is merely "possible" alternatives, objectively "exist" (are real) when they…

A paper published by Scottish geophysicist J.A. Broun in 1858 contained several pioneering and remarkable ideas in solar-terrestrial physics. He could anticipate more or less correctly the nature and origin of solar wind, solar magnetic…

Dawning neutron physics was more complex than one might expect. The chance that the neutron comprised a proton and an electron was diffusely taken into account after the discovery of the neutron. Moreover, uncertainties persisted about the…

This paper deals with the Physics Institute of via Panisperna in Rome, getting ready for investigation on neutron physics before Fermi's discovery of neutron-induced radioactivity. The importance of nuclear research had been acknowledged in…

We discuss the photograph procured from the archives of the V. Stefanyk Lviv National Scientific Library of Ukraine dated by 1904 which shows Marian Smoluchowski together with professors and graduate students of the Philosophy department of…

We outline Fermi's early attitude towards old quantum physics. We sketch out the context from which his interest for quantum physics arose, and we deal with his work on quantum statistics. We also go through the first two courses on…

A major part of Marian Smoluchowski's achievements in science corresponds to the period of his work at the University of Lviv. Since this part is well described in the literature, in the paper the emphasis is made on some less known…

Mathematics and its relation to the physical universe have been the topic of speculation since the days of Pythagoras. Several different views of the nature of mathematics have been considered: Realism - mathematics exists and is…

Observed violations of Bell type inequalities exclude all relativistic micro causal ("local"), counterfactual definite ("real") hidden variable models of nature. This further relativization of our concept of reality triggers a growing…

Simon van der Meer was a brilliant scientist and a true giant in the field of accelerators. His seminal contributions to accelerator science are essential to this day in our quest to satisfy the demands of modern particle physics. Whether…